Celebrate Earth Day 2018!

Earth Day is one of those days not everyone is aware happens, even with all of the news and notable facts about our resources and pollution. EXAIR is committed to raising awareness of Earth Day and encourages everyone to find an activity which produces action in the spirit of Earth Day. For example, could you help clean up a riverbank in your town, or plant some trees in a park, or recycle your household plastic/glass/aluminum/cardboard? The Earth Day website has a bunch of great suggestions for you to make a difference.

Volunteers help cleanup

At my home, we recycle our glass, metal, plastic and cardboard. At EXAIR we continue to make progress in reducing our overall footprint as well.

Sunday, April 22nd marks the 48th annual Earth Day and it will be observed in 192 countries. For EXAIR, this year marks our 35th year helping compressed air users save compressed air energy and electrical resources. It is also another year that we continue to focus on manufacturing our products with minimal impact and doing our part to help protect our planet. We are proud to manufacture efficient products, implement processes and programs throughout our facility to help use our resources wisely and recycle everything we possibly can.

First and foremost, we manufacture and sell Intelligent Compressed Air Products that are specifically designed to reduce the use of compressed air throughout facilities. On top of that, when you purchase an EXAIR product it will arrive in fully recyclable packaging and, in most cases, is made from a material that will be recyclable should it reach a point it is no longer useful.

In the past year we have improved the efficiency of our computers and computer servers which require fewer Kilowatt hours (KWH) per day . We have been able to reduce KWH/day by over 56%! This reduces our impact on the local electricity provider and further shrinks our impact upon precious resources.

EXAIR recycles 100% of the metal scrap from our machining processes, which equates to 6.5 tons. Our cardboard and mixed paper products are also recycled 100%. Of the waste we place into our trash dumpsters – 80% is recycled and 20% is sent to the landfill. The paper products even get down to all of paper towels that are used and all the scratch paper that the office utilizes. In total, EXAIR recycled 35.4 tons of paper and cardboard in 2017. We focus on more ways to improve this percentage every year.

Another waste reducing factor that has proven to work out well for EXAIR is asking every customer if they accept digital invoices rather than requiring them to be printed and mailed. Thanks to our wonderful customers we have been able to eliminate 91% of all printed and mailed invoices which helps to reduce our resources used as well as the amount of materials that are possibly turned into solid wastes at their facilities. This also prevents the gas and vehicles necessary to deliver all of these invoices by mail.

To get back to what EXAIR products have done to help reduce waste, we were also able to optimize our own compressed air system by eliminating air leaks and have saved 1 million cubic feet of compressed air. We have also utilized our very own Chip Trapper Systems in our manufacturing areas and extended the water soluble coolant life from 6 weeks per changeover to 6 months per changeover. Keeping our coolant clean allows us to minimize the total amount of wastewater we recycle each year.

We continued to reduce our wastewater for reclamation – in 2017 we recycled 795 gallons, a reduction of 213 gallons compared to 2016, due to extending the life of our coolant.

On top of all the efforts above, we also continue to maintain RoHS compliance on all electronic products, as well as actively track our supply chains to ensure no Conflict Minerals are being sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

If you have any questions on how we can help your facility reduce their use of compressed air or why we continue to reduce our wastes and increase our recycling efforts, contact us.